lands some love-message on its wings. Yet humble after all thou art; for all day long, making thy industry thy delight, thou returnest at shut of day, cheerful even in thy weariness, to thy ground cell within the knoll, where as Fancy dreams the Fairies dwell-a Silent People in the Land of Peace.

And why hast thou, wild singing spirit of the Highland Glenorchy, that cheerest the long-withdrawing vale from Inveruren to Dalmally, and from Dalmally Church-tower to the Old Castle of Kilchurn, round whose mouldering turrets thou sweepest with more pensive murmur, till thy name and existence are lost in that noble loch - why hast thou never had thy Bard? "A hundred bards have. I had in bygone ages," is thy reply; "but the Sassenach understands not the traditionary strains, and the music of the Gaelic poetry is wasted on his ear." Songs of war and of love are yet awakened by the shepherds among these lonely braes; and often when the moon rises over Ben Crachan, and counts her attendant stars in soft reflection beneath the still waters of that long inland sea, she hears the echoes of harps chiming through the silence of departed years. Tradition tells, that on no other banks did the fairies so love to thread the mazes of their mystic dance, as on the heathy, and brackeny, and oaken banks of the Orchy, during the long summer nights when the thick-falling dews perceptibly swelled the stream, and lent a livelier music to every waterfall.

'There it was, on a little river island, that once, whether sleeping or waking we know not, we saw celebrated a Fairy's Funeral. First we heard small pipes playing, as if no bigger than hollow rushes that whisper to the night winds; and more pileous than aught that trills from earthly instrument was the scarce audible dirge! It seemed to float over the stream, every foam-bell emitting a plaintive note, till the airy anthem came floating over our couch, and then alighted without footsteps among the heather. The pattering of little feet was then heard, as if living creatures were arranging themselves in order, and then there was nothing but a more ordered hymn. The harmony was like the melting of musical dewdrops, and sang, without words, of sorrow and death. We opened our eyes, or rather sight came to them when closed, and dream was vision! Hundreds of creatures, no taller than the crest of the lapwing, and all hanging down their veiled heads, stood in a circle on a green plat among the rocks; and in the midst was a bier, framed as it seemed of flowers unknown to the Highland hills; and on the bier a Fairy, lying with uncovered face, pale as the lily, and motionless as the snow. The dirge grew fainter and fainter, and then died quite away; when two of the creatures came from the circle, and took their station, one at the head and the other at the foot of the bier. They sang alternate measures, not louder than the twittering of the awakened wood-lark before it goes up the dewy air, but dolorous and full of the desolation of death. The flower-bier stirred; for the spot on which it lay sank slowly down, and in a few moments the greensward was smooth as ever the very dews glittering above the buried Fairy. A cloud passed over the moon; and, with a choral lament, the funeral troop sailed duskily away,

"Tis a vast Glen. Not one single human dwelling any where specklike on the river-winding plain or nest-like among the brushwood knolls -or rock-like among the fractured cliffs far up on the mountain region do our eyes behold, eager as they are to discover some symptom of life. Two houses we know to be in the solitude-ay, two-one of them near the head of the Loch, and the other near the head of the Glen-but both distant from this our Tent, which is pitched between, in the very heart of the Moor. We were mistaken in saying that Dalness is invisible-for yonder it looms in a sullen light, and, before we have finished the sentence, may have again sunk into the moor. Ay, it is gone-for lights and shadows coming and going, we know not whence nor whither, here travel all day long-the sole tenants-very ghostlike-and seemingly in their shiftings embued with a sort of dim uncertain life. How far off from our Tent may be the Loch? Miles-and silently as snow are seen to break the waves along the shore, while beyond them hangs in aerial haze, the great blue water. How far off from our Tent may be the mountains at the head of the Glen? Miles-for though that speck in the sky into which they upheave their mighty altitudes, be doubtless an eagle, we cannot hear its cry. What giants are these right opposite our Pyramid? Co-grim chieftain and his Tail. What an assemblage of thunder-riven cliffs! This is what may be well called-Nature on a grand scale. And then, how simple! We begin to feel ourselves-in spite of all we can do to support our dignity by our pride - a mighty small and insignificant personage. We are about six feet high-and every body around us about four thousand. Yes, that is the Four Thousand Feet Club! We had no idea that in any situation we could be such dwindled dwarfs, such perfect pigmies. Our Tent is about as big as a fir-cone -and Christopher North an insect!

'What a wild world of clouds all over that vast central wilderness of Northern Argyleshire lying between Cruachan and Melnatorran-Corryfinuarach and Ben Slarive; a prodigious land! defying description, and in memory resembling not realities, but like fragments of tremendous dreams. Is it a sterile region? Very. In places nothing but stones. Not a blade of grass-not a bent of heather- not even moss. And so they go shouldering up into the sky-enormous masses- huger than churches or ships. And sometimes not un→ like such and other structures-all huddled together -yet never jostling, so far as we have seen; and though often overhanging, as if the wind might blow them over with a puff, steadfast in the storm that seems rather to be an earthquake, and moving not a hair's-breadth, while all the shingly sides of the mountains-you know shingle-with an inconstant clatter-hurry-skurry-seem to be breaking up into debris.

'Is that the character of the whole region? No, you darling; it has vales on vales of emerald, and mountains on mountans of amethyst, and

streams on streams of silver; and, so help us Heaven!-for with these eyes we have seen them, a thousand and a thousand times-at sunrise, and sunset, rivers on rivers of gold. What kind of climate? All kinds, and all kinds at once-not merely during the same season, but the same hour. Suppose it three o'clock of a summer afternoonyou have but to choose your weather. Do you desire a close sultry breathless gloom? You have it in the stifling dens of Ben-Anea, where lions might breed. A breezy coolness, with a sprinkling of rain? Then open your vest to the green light in the dewy vales of Benlura. Lochs look lovely

in mist and so thinks the rainbow-then away with you ere the rainbow fade-away, we beseech you, to the wild shores of Lochan-a-Lurich. But you would rather see a storm, and hear some Highland thunder? There is one at this moment on Unimore, and Cruachlia growls to Meallanuir, till the cataracts of Glashgour are dumb as the dry rocks of Craig-Teonan.’

The following, from Our Winter Quarters,' is in a gayer strain; and we should pity the person who could read the passage without wiping his eyes of drops which honest laughter had engendered;' and without at the same time admiring the grace with which fancy and wit are made to blend with the seeming egotism and extravagance of the picture:

In

'Let no man have two houses with one set of furniture. Home's deepest delight is undisturbance. Some people think no articles fixtures-not even grates. But sofas and ottomans, and chairs and footstools, and screens-and, above all, beds -- all are fixtures in the dwelling of a wise man, cognoscitive and sensitive of the blessings of this life. Each has its own place assigned to it by the taste, tact, and feeling of the master of the mansion, where order and elegance minister to comfort, and comfort is but a homely word for happiness. various moods we vary their arrangement—nor is even the easiest of all Easy-chairs secure for life against being gently pushed on his wheels from chimney-nook to window-corner, when the sunshine may have extinguished the fire, and the blue sky tempts the Pater-familias, or him who is but an uncle, to lie back with half-shut eyes, and gaze upon the cheerful purity, even like a shepherd on the hill. But these little occasional disarrangements serve but to preserve the spirit of permanent arrangement, without which the very virtue of domesticity dies. What sacrilege, therefore, against the Lares and Penates, to turn a whole house topsy-turvy, from garret to cellar, regularly as May-flowers deck the zone of the year! Why, a Turkey or a Persian, or even a Wilton or a Kidderminster carpet is as much the garb of the wooden floor inside, as the grass is of the earthen floor outside of your house. Would you lift and lay down the greensward? But without further illustration-be assured the cases are kindred-and so, too, with sofas and shrubs, tent-beds and trees. Independently, however, of these analogies, not fanciful, but lying deep in the nature of things, the inside of one's tabernacle, in town and country, ought ever to be sacred from all radical revolutionary movements, and to lie for ever in a waking dream of graceful repose. All our affections towards lifeless things become tenderer and deeper

in the continuous and unbroken flow of domestic habit. The eye gets lovingly familiarized with each object occupying its own peculiar and appropriate place, and feels in a moment when the most insignificant is missing or removed. We say not a word about children, for fortunately, since we are yet unmarried, we have none; but even they, if brought up Christians, are no dissenters from this creed, and however rackety in the nursery, in an orderly kept parlour or drawing-room how like so many pretty little white mice do they glide cannily along the floor! Let no such horror, then, as a flitting ever befall us or our friends! 0 mercy! only look at a long huge train of waggons, heaped up to the windows of the first floors, moving along the dust-driving or mire-choked streets with furniture from a gutted town-house towards one standing in the rural shades with an empty stomach! All is dimmed or destroyed-chairs crushed on the table-land, and four-posted beds lying helplessly with their astonished feet up to heaven sight that might make the angels weep!

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'People have wondered why we, an old barren bachelor, should live in such a large house. It is a palace; but never was there a greater mistake than to seek the solution in our pride. Silence can be had but in a large house. And silence is the chief condition of home happiness. We could now hear a leaf fall-a leaf of the finest wire-wove. Peter and Betty, Polly and the rest, inhabit the second sunk story-and it is delightful to know that they may be kicking up the most infernal disturbance at this blessed moment, and tearing out each other's hair in handfuls, without the faintest whisper of the uproar reaching us in our altitude above the drawing-room flat. On New Year's Day morning there is regularly a competition of bag-pipers in the kitchen, and we could fondly imagine 'tis an Eolian Harp. In his pantry Peter practised for years on the shrill clarion, and for years on the echoing horn; yet had he thrown up both instruments in despair of perfection ere we so much as knew that he had commenced his musical studies. In the sunk story, immediately below that, having been for a season consumptive, we kept a Jenny ass and her daughter-and though we believe it was not unheard around Moray and Ainslie Places, and even in Charlotte Square, we cannot charge our memory with an audit of their bray. In the sunk story immediately below that again, that distinguished officer on half-pay, Captain Campbell of the Highlanders-when on a visit to us for a year or two-though we seldom saw him-got up a Sma' still-and though a more harmless creature could not be, there he used to sit for hours together, with the worm that never dies. On one occasion, it having been supposed by Peter that the Captain had gone to the East Neuk of Fife, weeks elapsed, we remember, ere he was found sitting dead, just as if he had been alive, in his usual attitude in his arm-chair, commanding a view of the precipice of the back

court.

'Just as quiet are the Attics. They, too, are furnished; for the feeling of there being one unfurnished room, however small, in the largest house, disturbs the entire state of mind of such an occupant, and when cherished and dwelt on, which it must not unfrequently be, inspires a cold air of desolation throughout the domicile, till "thoughts

The

of flitting rise." There is no lumber-room. room containing Blue-Beard's murdered wives might in idea be entered without distraction by a bold mind. But oh! the lumber-room, into which, on an early walk through the house of a friend on whom we had been sorning, all unprepared did we once set our foot! From the moment-and it was but for a moment, and about six o'clock-far away in the country-that appalling vision met our eyes -till we found ourselves, about another six o'clock, in Moray Place, we have no memory of the flight of time. Part of the journey-or Voyage-we suspect, was performed in a steamer. The noise of knocking, and puffing, and splashing seems to be in our inner ears; but after all it may have been a sail-boat, possibly a yacht!-In the Attics an Aviary open to the sky. And to us below, the many voices, softened into one sometimes in the pauses of severer thought, are sometimes very affecting, so serenely sweet it seems, as the laverocks in our youth at the gates of

heaven.

'At our door stand the Guardian Genii, Sleep and Silence. We had an ear to them in the building of our house, and planned it after a long summer day's perusal of the Castle of Indolence. O Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy Thomson!-0 that thou and we had been rowers in the same boat on the silent river! Rowers, indeed! Short the spells and far between that we should have taken the one would not have turned round the other, but when the car chanced to drop out of his listless hand- and the canoe would have been allowed to drift with the stream, unobservant we of our backward course, and wondering and then ceasing to wonder at the slow receding beauty of the hanging banks of grove-the cloud-mountains, immovable as those of earth, and in spirit one world.

*

In

'All our ceilings are deadened-we walk ankledeep in carpeting-nobody is suffered to open a door but ourselves-and they are so constructed, that it is out of their power to slam. Our winter furniture is all massy-deepening the repose. all the large rooms two fireplaces-and fires are kept perpetually burning day and night, in them all, which, reflected from spacious mirrors, give the mansion quite the appearance of a Pandemonium. Not gas always. Palm-oil burns scentless as moonlight; and when motion, not rest, in a place is signified, we accompany ourselves with a wax candle, or taper from time immemorial green. Yet think not that there is a blaze of light. We have seen the midnight heaven and earth nearly as bright, but with one moon and a small scatter of stars. And places of glimmer-and places of gloom -and places "deaf to sound and blind to light" there are in this our mansion, known but to ourselves-cells-penitentiaries-where an old man may sit sighing and groaning, or stupified in his misery-or at times almost happy. So senseless, and worse than senseless, seems then all mortal tribulation and anguish, while the self-communing soul is assured, by its own profound responses, that whatever is, is best."

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And thus is our domicile a domain- -a kingdom. We should not care to be confined to it all the rest of our days. Seldom, indeed, do we leave our own door-yet call on us, and ten to one you hear us in winter chirping like a cricket, or in summer like a grashopper. We have the whole

range of the house to ourselves, and many an Excursion make we on the Crutch. Ascending and descending the wide-winding staircases, each broad step not above two inches high, we find ourselves on spacious landing-places illumined by the dim religious light of stained windows, on which pilgrims, and palmers, and prophets, single, or in pairs or troops, are travelling on missions through glens or forests or by sea-shores-or shepherd piping in the shade, or poet playing with the tangles of Neæra's hair. We have discovered a new principle on which, within narrow bounds, we have constructed Panoramic Dioramas, that show splendid segments of the great circle of the world. We paint all of them ourselves-now a Poussin, now a Thomson, now a Claude, now a Turner, now a Rubens, now a Danby, now a Salvator, now a Maclise.'

Whether the fair sex will be disposed to forgive the following strictures on their talents for sketching, we know not-though probably each individual may admit the general rule, and consider her own case as falling within the exception; but the passage is at least irresistibly comic. It occurs in the description of a Stroll to Grassmere."

'My sweet Harriet, that sketch does you credit, and it is far from being very unlike the original. Rather too many chimneys by about half-a-dozen; and where did you find that steeple immediately over the window marked "Dairy?" The pigs are somewhat too sumptuously lodged in that elegant sty, and the hen-roost might accommodate a phoenix. But the features of the chief porch are very happily hit off-you have caught the very attic spirit of the roof and some of the windows may be justly said to be staring likenesses. Ivy-cottage is slipped into our portfolio, and we shall compare it, on our return to Scotland, with Buchanan Lodge.

'Gallantry forbids, but Truth demands to say, that young ladies are but indifferent sketchers. The dear creatures have no notion of perspective. At flower-painting and embroidery, they are pretty fair hands, but they make sad work among waterfalls and ruins. Notwithstanding, it is pleasant to hang over them, seated on stone or stool, drawing from nature; and now and then to help them in with a horse or a hermit. It is a difficult, almost an impossible thing-that foreshortening. The most speculative genius is often at a loss to conjecture the species of a human being foreshortened by a young lady. The hanging Tower at Pisa is, we believe, some thirty feet or so off the perpendicular, and there is one at Caerphilly about seventeen; but these are nothing to the castles in the air we have seen built by the touch of a female magician; nor is it an unusual thing with artists of the fair sex to order their plumed chivalry to gallop down precipices considerably steeper than a house, on animals apparently produced between the tiger and the bonassus. When they have succeeded in getting something like the appearance of water between what may be conjectured banks, they are not very particular about its running occasionally uphill; and it is interesting to see a stream stealing quietly below trees in gradual ascension, till, disappearing for a few minutes over one summit, it comes thundering down another, in the shape of a waterfall, on the head of an elderly gentleman, unsuspectingly reading Mr. Wordsworth's Excursion, perhaps, in the foreground.'

How playful and pleasing, too, is the coquetry of the passage to which this is the prelude:

'On such excursions there are sure to occur a few enviable adventures. First, the girths get wrong, and, without allowing your beloved virgin to alight, you spend more time than is absolutely necessary in arranging them; nor can you help admiring the attitude into which the graceful creature is forced to draw up her delicate limbs, that her fairy feet may not be in the way to impede your services. By and by, a calf-which you hope will be allowed to grow up into a cow -stretching up her curved red back from behind a wall, startles John Darby, albeit unused to the starting mood, and you leap four yards to the timely assistance of the fair shrieker, tenderly pressing her bridle-hand as you find the rein that has not been lost, and wonder what has become of the whip that never existed A little further on, a bridgeless stream crosses the road-a dangerous-looking ford indeed-a foot deep at the very least, and scorning wet feet, as they ought to be scorned, you almost carry, serene in danger, your affianced bride (or she is in a fair way of becoming so) in your arms off the saddle, nor relinquish the delightful clasp till all risk is at an end, some hundred yards on, along the velvet herbage. Next stream you come to has indeed a bridge-but then what a bridge! A long, coggly, cracked slate-stone, whose unsteady clatter would make the soberest steed jump over the moon. You beseech the timid girl to sit fast, and she almost leans down to your breast as you press to meet the blessed burden, and to prevent the steady old stager from leaping over the battlements. But now the chasm on each side of the narrow path is so tremendous, that she must dismount, after due disentanglement, from that awkward, old-fashioned crutch and pummel, and from a stirrup, into which a little foot, when it has once crept like a mouse, finds itself caught as in a trap of singular construction, and difficult to open for releasement. You feel that all you love in the world is indeed fully, freshly, and warmly in your arms, nor can you bear to set the treasure down on the rough stony road, but look round, and round, and round, for a soft spot, which you finally prophesy at some distance up the hill, whitherwards, it spite of pouting Yea and Nay, you persist in carrying her whose head is erelong to lie in your tranquil bosom.'

We feel, however, that quotations are multiplying upon us, while our limits are fast contracting. And therefore, with the single observation, that the two Papers which are to us the least agreeable in these volumes are the 'Holy Child' and the tale entitled Expiation,' (the latter, indeed, producing in us a sensation of discomfort and pain rather than pleasure,) let us close our extracts with a passage from the touching and beautiful 'L'Envoy,' with which these volumes conclude:

'Since first this Golden Pen of ours-given us by One who meant it but for a memorial-began, many years ago, to let drop on paper a few careless words, what quires so distained-some pages, let us hope, with durable ink-have accumulated on our hands! Some haughty ones have chosen to say rather, how many leaves have been

wafted away to wither? But not a few of the gifted-near and afar-have called on us with other voices-reminding us that long ago we were elected, on sight of our credentials-not indeed without a few black balls-into the Brotherhood. The shelf marked with our initials exhibits some half-dozen volumes only, and has room for scores. It may not be easily found in that vast Library; but humble member as we are, we feel it now to be a point of honour to make an occasional contribution to the Club. So here is the FIRST SERIES of what we have chosen to call our RɛCREATIONS. There have been much recasting and remoulding-many alterations, believed by us to have been wrought with no unskilful spirit of change-cruel, we confess, to our feelings, rejections of numerous lucubrations to their father dear-and if we may use such words, not a few new creations, in the same genial spirit in which we worked of old-not always unrewarded by sympathy, which is better than praise.

'For kindness shown when kindness was most needed for sympathy and affection-yea, love itself for grief and pity not misplaced, though bestowed in a mistaken belief of our condition, forlorn indeed, but not wholly forlorn-for solace and encouragement sent to us from afar, from cities and solitudes, and from beyond seas and oceans, from brethren who never saw our face, and never may see it, we owe a debt of everlasting gratitude; and life itself must leave our heart, that beats not now as it used to beat, but with dismal trepidation, before it forget, or cease to remember as clearly as now it hears them, every one of the many words that came sweetly and solemnly to us from the Great and Good. Joy and sorrow make up the lot of our mortal estate, and by sympathy with them, we acknowledge our brotherhood with all our kind. We do far more. The strength that is untasked, lends itself to divide the load under which another is bowed; and the calamity that lies on the heads of men is lightened, while those who at the time are not called to bear, are yet willing to involve themselves in the sorrow of a brother. So soothed by such sympathy may a poor mortal be, that the wretch almost upbraids himself for transient gleams of gladness, as if he were false to the sorrow which he sighs to think he ought to have cherished more sacredly within his miserable heart.

'One word embraces all these pages of oursMemorials. Friends are lost to us by removalfor then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten. But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some affecting change wrought on face and figure by climate and by years. Let it be but his name written with his own hand on the title-page of a book; or a few syllables on the margin of a favourite passage which long ago we may have read together, when life itself was new," and poetry overflowed the whole world; or a lock of her hair in whose eyes we first knew the meaning of the word depth." And if death had stretched out the absence into the dim arms of eternity-and removed the distance away into that bourne from which

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